Before George Floyd, before Breonna Taylor, before America knew about Black Lives Matter, there was Michael Brown, Jr. On August 9th, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed Brown. The community reacted in protest, anger, frustration, and fear. Six years later, a new story emerges - one filled with hope, love, and beauty.
A personal reflection on 2020's Black Lives Matter protests.
At America's elite MIT, a Ghanaian alum follows four African students as they strive to graduate and become agents of change for their home countries Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey, all must decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.
This untold history of Toronto's Black queer community spans four decades of passionate activist rebellion. Refusing to be silenced and raging with love, the featured trailblazers demanded a city where they could all live their truths free from the threat of violence. In the spaces they found for loud laughter and sweaty block parties, they also found themselves. Each bit of revolutionary ground was gained collaboratively, whether protesting police brutality, forming feminist collectives or making room for grief and healing in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Their transformative creativity and visionary organizing made Toronto more livable for generations to follow. Our Dance of Revolution celebrates the living legends among us by unearthing what has been made invisible. Come honour this hidden chapter of Toronto's history and witness the courage it took to dance in the street for the struggle.
Pikilina is a Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent. Racial and political violence erupts when the country of her birth, the Dominican Republic, reverses birthright citizenship and she and 200,000 others are left stateless.
In World War II. African-American GIs liberate Germany from Nazi rule while racism prevailed in their own army and home country. Returning home they continue fighting for their own rights in the civil rights movement.
On August 1, 1942, a 22-year-old Mexican American man was stabbed to death at a party. To white Los Angelenos, the murder was just more proof that Mexican American crime was spiraling out of control. The police fanned out across LA, netting 600 young Mexican American suspects. Almost all those taken into custody were wearing the distinctive uniform of their generation: Zoot Suits. The tragic murder and the injustice of the trial that followed, coupled with sensational news coverage of both, fanned the flames of the racial hostility that was already running rife in the city. Within months of the verdict, Los Angeles was in the grip of some of the worst violence in its history.
An intimate portrait of Alabama public interest attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, who for more than three decades has advocated on behalf of the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned, seeking to eradicate racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.
During the same summer as Woodstock, over 300,000 people attended the Harlem Cultural Festival, celebrating African American music and culture, and promoting Black pride and unity. The footage from the festival sat in a basement, unseen for over 50 years, keeping this incredible event in America's history lost — until now.
Spies of Mississippi tells the story of a secret spy agency formed by the state of Mississippi to preserve segregation and maintain white supremacy. The anti-civil rights organization was hidden in plain sight in an unassuming office in the Mississippi State Capitol. Funded with taxpayer dollars and granted extraordinary latitude to carry out its mission, the Commission evolved from a propaganda machine into a full blown spy operation. How do we know this is true? The Commission itself tells us in more than 146,000 pages of files preserved by the State. This wealth of first person primary historical material guides us through one of the most fascinating and yet little known stories of America's quest for Civil Rights.
Crump's mission to raise the value of Black life as the civil lawyer for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Black farmers and banking while Black victims, Crump challenges America to come to terms with what it owes his clients.
Documentary depicts what happened in Rio de Janeiro on June 12th 2000, when bus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to shoot all the passengers. Transmitted live on all Brazilian TV networks, this shocking and tragic-ending event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the scariest examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
Profiled is a feature length documentary that knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latin unarmed youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Driven by anger when their demands for justice are ignored the women transition from grieving parents to activists participating in the grass roots movement now spreading across the country since the much-publicized deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
In 1978 the police attacked demonstrators at the Sydney (Australia) Mardi Gras celebrations. This film details the communities' responses.
Documentary examining the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke and the cover-up that ensued.
In 2020, five kids were victims of police gunfire. One of them, Blas Correas, was killed. In spite of the attempts to cover it up, institutional violence and police brutality came to light.
Follows the young people of Selma, Alabama's RATCo (Random Acts of Theatre Company) as they journey to New York City to share their story of hope, resilience, and overcoming.
An archival documentary about the U.S. military’s response to the political and racial injustices of the late 1960s: take a military base, build a mock inner-city set, cast soldiers to play rioters, burn the place down, and film it all.
A documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.
French documentary campaigning for the liberalization of abortion and contraception, directed by Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel in 1973.